Kings In Grass Castles

by Mary Durack

  About the Book

  The best saga of pastoral Australia ever published.

  ‘… far better than any novel; an incomparable record of a great family and a series of great actions.’

  The Bulletin

  ‘There has never been a biographical work of this class in the history of Australian writing.’

  Nation

  When Patrick Durack left Western Ireland for Australia in 1853, he was to build a cattle empire across the great stretches of Australia and to found a pioneering dynasty. With a profound sense of family history, his grand-daughter, Mary Durack, reconstructed the Durack saga – a story of intrepid men and groundbreaking adventure. This sweeping tale of Australia and Australians remains a classic nearly fifty years on.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps and Tables

  Introduction

  1 Roots

  2 Colonial Background

  3 The Golden Years

  4 Digging In

  5 Land of their Own

  6 Goulburn Days

  7 Wedding Bells

  8 Prophet of the New Colony

  9 Of Plans Deferred

  10 Exodus

  11 A Land Loved by Birds

  12 Land of Waiting

  13 The Battling Years

  14 Turn of the Tide

  15 Closer Settlement

  16 Eye Witness

  17 New Towns in the Wilderness

  18 One Thousand Miles to School

  19 Western Horizons

  20 To Find a River

  21 Promised Land

  22 Start of the Big Trek

  23 The Rule of the Road

  24 On to the Territory

  25 End of an Epic

  26 Meanwhile in Queensland

  27 The Golden Year

  28 Settling In

  29 The Gold and the Grass

  30 Nemesis

  31 Life and Death in Kimberley

  32 Prosperity—at a Price

  33 Expanding Boundaries

  34 Glimpses of ‘The Naughty Nineties’

  35 Return to Ireland

  36 End of an Era

  Acknowledgements

  Index of Searchable Terms

  Notes

  Also by Mary Durack

  Picture Section

  Copyright Notice

  Loved the book?

  TO THE MEMORY OF MY GRANDFATHER

  PATRICK DURACK

  AND TO THE SUCCESS OF MY BROTHER

  KIMBERLEY MICHAEL DURACK

  IN HIS WORK FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF

  THE KIMBERLEY DISTRICT OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

  I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

  MAPS AND TABLES

  Durack family tree

  Goulburn District, NSW

  Western Queensland

  East Kimberley, WA

  Station areas, Kimberley division, WA, and Victoria River district, NT

  INTRODUCTION

  For many years now I have lived in three generations, following vague and winding tracks in search of missing clues and facts long buried in the drifts of time. My father often remarked upon the shortness and fallibility of human memory but even he, I think, would have been surprised to find how many aspects of his father’s life had either completely eluded his generation or become distorted with the passing years. He had always wanted me some day to write of the family’s pioneering efforts but it was not until after his death that I discovered the collection of Grandfather Patsy’s old account books, stock records, cheque-butts, random jottings, and letters to his family, and I set about putting them together, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, against the background of his times. While so doing, this man who died so long before my birth, drew towards me out of the fog of years until I seemed to know him more intimately than 1 had my own father. Only then could I understand the drive and purpose that had goaded him into the wilderness, and the yearning and sadness of his eyes in that last portrait.

  I believed the story should be recorded if only for archival purposes, and I attacked the process of research and compilation with something of the dogged spirit of those overlanding drovers who, having undertaken the job, were committed come what might to see it through. As it happened it took me considerably longer than that cattle trek from Queensland to the Kimberley, with delays caused not by drought and flood but by the inevitable crises of family life, including the birth of children along the track.

  My publisher considered the resulting volume worth producing, even if unlikely to sell beyond a limited edition, and it was to our mutual surprise that the book, first published in 1959, met with such an appreciative public. I had not intended continuing the family story beyond my grandfather’s lifetime but in the early 1970s I felt impelled to take up the task again, and completed a sequel—Sons in the Saddle—which was published in 1983. This book begins at the time of my grandfather’s death in 1898, when my father took over as head of his branch of the family. With a background of world and local events and the ever-changing economic and political situation, it follows the fluctuating fortunes of surviving family members and their associates, including a steadily increasing younger generation.

  My father, as general manager of Connor, Doherty & Durack’s widespread northern properties, company director, politician and indefatigable traveller, lived a full and active life until his death in 1950, at the age of eighty-five.

  An unexpected outcome of these publications has been the drawing together of far-flung branches of the family, not only throughout Australia but also in the United States, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand. Ensuing correspondence has revealed family characteristics that have survived time, distance and diverse circumstances and has also stimulated mutual interest in the causes influencing our different national characters and constitutions. It is an interesting subject, and a few observations on the development of these factors in Australia might place the context of this book in better general perspective.

  Impossible though it be to parallel the turbulent complex of United States history with Australia’s comparatively short and simple story, it can at least be said that both cultures have been largely inclined by the productivity of the land and that the frontier conditions of each country left a lasting impression on its national character and government.

  After the penetration of the Great Dividing Range in the early 1820s Australia’s westward drive was as rapid and vigorous as the American, and in both countries early land laws were desperately contrived to accommodate individuals who were impatient—even contemptuous—of official restraint. Hopes of Australia’s westward flowing streams emptying into a vast inland sea were, however, soon dispelled, the harsh truth being that the total annual run-off of her rivers was a mere 200 million acre feet, compared with 1,300 million in the United States. Therefore while America’s frontier moved into a fertile west before consolidating ranks of small farming families, in Australia thin spearheads of settlement strung on into the mirage of an increasingly arid interior. Britain’s demand for wool and the land’s suitability for sheep-raising strongly influenced early Australian enterprise, especially since agriculture, possible only in the higher rainfall areas, was difficult and not very profitable.

  The large areas required to run stock on an open range of natural pastures were readily available, but the Crown, mindful of its duty to posterity in dealing with land of untried potential, hesitated to confer extensive freehold rights. As the squatters increased in confidence and power, their demands secured them the tenure of restricted but vital areas, and by purchasing for a few pounds all permanent waterholes and river frontages they managed to tie up hundreds,
sometimes thousands, of acres of grazing land.

  The gold rushes of the 1850s brought a big influx of land-hungry men, a number from the diggings in California with stories of umhampered free selection on the American prairies, and these newcomers eventually broke the domination of the squatting minority. The Free Selection Act of the early sixties, designed to uphold the rights of the small settler, somewhat paralleled the United States Homestead Act of the same period but, though both were subject to similar abuse, the American Act was considerably more successful.

  In Australia the development of small farms proved so costly and difficult that unscrupulous big men could readily find ‘dummy’ selectors to occupy resumed parts of their estates. The Act, however, had the overall effect of breaking up the higher rainfall areas and of pushing the frontier forward into arid ‘marginal’ regions where anything other than open-range grazing was impractical.

  No one in this country was ever satisfied with the land laws. Every attempt to mollify the big holders in their demands for the greater security of tenure that would encourage them to improve their properties and develop the pastoral industry brought from the landless or small holders louder protests against ‘favouritism’ towards the grasping sheep or cattle ‘kings’.

  That Australia’s land laws, rightly described as ‘a jungle penetrable only to the initiate’, did tend to favour the big holders was actually a reluctant concession to harsh reality. As many a determined trier or ‘battler’ learned to his sorrow, it was only men with enough capital to improve and maintain large pastoral leases who could make out in those drought-menaced, light-carrying areas.

  In time, when the discovery of the artesian flow made smaller holdings practical, many of the larger properties were broken up, but the Australian frontier remained the province of the relatively big pastoral holder.

  The country, however, was never really at ease with the situation or happily resigned to the fact that so few should control so much. The voice of Australian democracy was always the voice of the struggling majority against the more fortunate few.

  Herein lies an essential difference between the two countries, for ours was not the American democracy of abundance but that of a land which, though roughly the size of the United States, was possessed of considerably poorer resources. In theory, free from the old-world restrictions of class and tradition, every man had an equal chance of getting on, but success was a lottery in which the prizes were few and far between.

  People in these conditions developed, to be sure, a great deal of initiative, resourcefulness and self-reliance, but these were generally expended in the sheer struggle for survival that fostered collective security rather than the competitive individualism of the United States. The Australian tradition of ‘mateship’ had its roots in the mutual dependence of small, scattered communities in a tough and often hostile environment.

  Sometimes individuals like Patsy Durack starting from scratch could, with a rare combination of luck, good timing, drive, and sagacity, win through to be prosperous landholders, but the average man had no such prospect, and the further out he got, the less were his chances of being anything other than a wage-earner.

  The frontier, however, did attract a certain, perhaps uniquely Australian type: the itinerant stockman or drover, who, ambitious within the limitations of the bush, took pride in his horsemanship, his knowledge of handling stock and his ‘bushmanship’, which covered a variety of skills, such as setting a course in trackless country, living off the land, coping with the Aborigines and generally surviving in the toughest circumstances. Almost all these men, knowing their only chance of a break-through to lie in a stroke of phenomenal luck, combined their stockwork with a constant search for gold. With this added incentive there was no corner of the continent they were not prepared to probe, mapping with extraordinary perception the areas of possible settlement, blazing new trails in the big stock drives of the seventies and eighties. In their nomadic calling, few of them ever gathered moss or settled into normal domesticity. Some of them found gold, or indications of gold, and even started rushes to various remote parts of the country, but others usually got the credit and the reward for their discoveries. Others occupied the country they opened up while they rode on to ever-receding horizons and lonely graves.

  That bush workers and employers alike were so matter of fact about their lives may have been due, in part, to a lack of Australian frontier literature, for they generally acknowledged the romance and excitement of America’s ‘Wild West’. For many it was the last retreat from the law, from society, from political intrigue. Some were survivors of the overland trails, among the best and toughest stock riders in the world, whose adventures would have outclassed the wildest fiction. Yet, while their American counterparts galloped the prairies with swinging lariats, creating legends to delight the world, these men were content to ride on in obscurity, performing feats of bushmanship and triumphs of endurance that left little country to be officially ‘opened up’ by the end of the last century.

  The boundaries of Australian agricultural and pastoral settlement as defined by that time have not substantially changed. Over one million square miles, or approximately one-third of the continent, lacking the discovery of hitherto unknown scientific aids, can carry only a very sparse population, and Australia is therefore proportionately more highly urbanised than any other country in the world. Despite this, however, and despite the influence of subsequent European migration, her salient national characteristics are strikingly relevant to those of that early frontier. All in all, Australians remain less assertive, less competitive, less excitable than the people of the United States, and Australia even in her most congested urban areas is still comparatively a relaxed and silent land.

  ‘The Lucky Country?’ ‘The Land of Opportunity?’ That would depend entirely on the point of view, but it would be wrong to suppose that her future is bound to the limitations of her past. She is still a land of expanding frontiers, although the outriders of modern development are not the tough and often illiterate bushmen of yesterday. They are the scientists and engineers, the pioneers of modern invention and industrial methods, the scholars and artists, tackling old problems with new skills, their horizons wide from the summit of every new discovery.

  MARY DURACK

  Perth, Western Australia

  February 1985

  1

  ROOTS

  Family origins and conditions of life in Western Ireland. The Great Famine of ’45 and the departure of Darby Durack and his wife for New South Wales in 1849.

  From the bridge across the River Bow which once divided the counties of Galway and Clare you may see on one side the green valley of Magerareagh and on the other the little town of Cappabaun in the ancient parish of Moynoe where the graves of my forebears lie tumbled and overgrown. Generations of Duracks were born around Magerareagh, which belonged to Galway until 1899, when it was moved within the boundary of Clare, and the farm on which they paid rent to some ‘upstart landlord’ lay close by on the slopes of Slieve Aughty Mountain. The land was poor and subject to the whims of shifting bog, serving as a constant reminder to my people of the chip they had carried on their shoulders since the year 1542 when their ancient heritage of Ogoneloe had been granted, in fee simple, to their traditional enemies.

  The past was always real and close to them, and their pride of race throve on the retelling of ancient wrongs and of glories still more remote. It seemed none so long ago to them that the Duracks, as a Dalcassian family, had fought beside Brian Boru, High King of all Ireland, against the invading Danes. ‘O’Dubraic’, the nearest translation of the name from the original Gaelic characters, was variously translated ‘dark prosperity’ or ‘dark outlook’. Their outlook, like that of all followers of the great Boru after his death at Clontarf, would have been dark enough, but if the inference was personal they must assuredly have changed, for whatever else they may show themselves in this story they were not pessimists.

  In the Book
of Ballymote, one of the world’s oldest documents, the name is given as ‘O’Dubraic of Dun Braine’, and it is quoted in the history of County Clare as among Irish names existing before the fourteenth century: ‘O’Dubraic, dynast UiConghail, now Durack, a name still locally known and applied to a district co-extensive with the parish of Ogoneloe, verging on Lough Deirgheirc, i.e. L. Derg.’

  It was here, on the slopes of Mount Bernagh, overlooking Scariff Bay that they held sway in ancient times:

  Family O’Durack of Dun Brain

  [sang the bard O’Heerin in about 1400]

  Are chieftains of Ogoneloe,

  Their forts about the good Boru

  Locks of hair like gold on their heads.

  In 1300 O’Duracks and O’Kennedys, backed by the Anglo-Norman de Grey, had fought against the powerful MacNamaras, backed by another Anglo-Norman, de Burge, a skirmish in keeping with the Norman policy of setting the Celtic clans at each other’s throats. Turlogh O’Brian, the ruling monarch of Thomond who disapproved of de Grey, banished O’Duracks and O’Kennedys for having had truck with him, but their exile was short-lived and they were soon back in possession of their land.

  When Henry VIII set about the conquest of the Irish nobility by granting confiscated monastic property to his supporters the ruling O’Briens, who accepted Henry as sovereign and head of the Church, were created earls and granted further estates. At the same time Sheeda, head of the MacNamaras, was granted a knighthood with the land of Ogoneloe thrown in, so that the O’Duracks, for their stubborn refusal to bend the knee to a Protestant overlord, not only became the tenant farmers of their ancient enemies but were stripped of all privileges, at last even the O’ prefix to their name. It is not to be supposed, however, that they settled down meekly under these humiliations. There were times when the MacNamaras must have wondered whether they had the best of the bargain, after all, for somewhere in the course of the long vendetta a certain ‘Red Mac’, in a fit of exasperation at their persistent sabotage, was said to have uttered a curse of such potency that any of the name to die in his bed past the prime of life was considered fortunate. When the family first came to Australia they could reel off ‘Red Mac’s’ victims for generations back, but such legends were given short shrift in this matter-of-fact land. The young people paid so little attention to the reminiscences of their elders that some became convinced, when none remained to deny it, of a link between the Gaelic name Durack and the French Du Roc, while an obliging armorial firm actually produced, for a fee, testimony of their relationship to Napoleon’s famous marshal! Fortunately for this record Irish documents and long-forgotten letters leave no shadow of doubt that if a French family named Du Roc sought refuge in Ireland after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 they assuredly had no connection with the clan O’Dubraic that for over one thousand years had tilled their fields and pastured their stock on the green banks of the Shannon at Ogoneloe. The French heresy was not without a shadow of reason though, for some of the first Australian generation vaguely recalled their old people’s references to stirring events in French history and to forebears who had perished on French battlefields. Had the long-cherished background of their people been less of a blank to these Australian born they might have connected such fragments with the story of the ‘wild geese’ who, after the signing of the Treaty of Limerick in 1691, went off to fight the cause of Irish liberty under Catholic flags in France, Italy and Spain. A certain Captain Will Durack of Limerick is listed as having died at Dettingen as a member of the famous ‘Irish Brigade’ that, under the motto ‘Semper et Ubique Fideles’ fought with the French armies for one hundred years.